Question

I am still a beginner developer – so forgive me if I get this question horibly wrong, but I have a class that builds a string based on the properties of another public struct. This used to work fine when the struct was named, but I wanted to allow this class to do the same with any kind of struct so I changed to using objects. This is the methoed I use to loop through the properties and construct the string – this is in a public class called constructors which I then call (without creating an instance of constructors) from the rest of my code.

    public string MyConstructor(object TheObject)
    {
        string S = "";

        Type t = TheObject.GetType();
        PropertyInfo[] PI = t.GetProperties();

        Constructors Cons = new Constructors();

        foreach (PropertyInfo info in PI)
        {
            S = MyConstructor(S, info, info.GetValue(TheObject, null););
        }

        return S;
    }

My problem is that it does not want to get out of the foreach loop. When I replaced it with

        for (int i = 0; i < PI.Count(); i++)
        {
            S = MyConstructor(S, PI[i], PI[i].GetValue(TheObject, null));
        }

and ran it through the debugger -> after each loop i goes 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1… MyConstructor has 2 overloads… the one above and another with (string, PropertyInfo, object). But even if I change the name of the second method to MyPropertyConstructor the same happens. At the moment the code is called from a form with no Threads so there isn’t any other threads that could in my mind interfere. Also for loop 0 and 1 the method returns empty strings “”. So how do I get out of this loop?

Here is the the rest of the code

    public static string MyConstructor(string CompiledString, PropertyInfo PropertyToAdd, object ThisValue)
    {
        string s = "";
        //object ThisValue = PropertyToAdd.GetValue(PropertyToAdd, null);

        //See if there is something to work with
        if(PropertyToAdd != null)
        {
            //Remove items which has been set not to record
            if (PropertyToAdd.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DontRecord), true).Length > 0)
            {
                if(((DontRecord)PropertyToAdd.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DontRecord), true)[0]).Record)
                {
                    return CompiledString;
                }
            }

            //see if it is the first time using the compile string
            if (CompiledString != "")
            {
                s += ";";
            }

            //For Testing
            int testint = 0;

            //only record items that where default value is different to their value
            Object[] Attr = PropertyToAdd.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DefaultValueAttribute), true);

            //see if there is a default value set
            if (Attr.Length > 0)
            {
                //Get Constructorname value
                Object[] constructorname = PropertyToAdd.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(ConstructorName), true);

                if (constructorname.Length > 0)
                {
                    s += ((ConstructorName)constructorname[0]).Name.ToString() + "=";



                    //If value is a string
                    if (PropertyToAdd.PropertyType == typeof(string))
                    {
                        if (Convert.ToString(((DefaultValueAttribute)Attr[0]).Value) != (string)ThisValue) { s += ThisValue; } else { s = ""; }
                    }

                    //Incase value is an int
                    else if (PropertyToAdd.PropertyType == typeof(int) && int.TryParse(ThisValue.ToString(), out testint))
                    {
                        if (Convert.ToInt32(((DefaultValueAttribute)Attr[0]).Value) != (int)ThisValue) { s += Convert.ToString((int)ThisValue); } else { s = ""; }
                    }

                    //Incase value is a bool
                    else if (PropertyToAdd.PropertyType == typeof(bool))
                    {
                        if (Convert.ToBoolean(((DefaultValueAttribute)Attr[0]).Value) != (bool)ThisValue)
                        {
                            if ((bool)ThisValue) { s += "True"; } else { s += "False"; }
                        }
                        else { s = ""; }
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        s = "";
                    }
                }
                else
                {
                    //There is no ConstructorName so therefore cannot create
                    return CompiledString;
                }
            }
            else
            {
                return CompiledString;
            }
        }

        return CompiledString += s;
    }

}

Here is a part of the type of objects passed initially to MyConstructor the public struct example

public struct ODBCDataString
{
#region Variables
#region General Variables
static string _connection = “”;
static string _saveString = “”;
static string _unsaveString = “”;
#endregion General Variables

        #region Security Variables
            static string _userID = "";
            static string _password = "";
        #endregion Security Variables

        #region Source Variables
            static string _dsn = "";
            static string _driver = "";
        #endregion Source Variables
    #endregion Variables

    #region Properties
        #region General
            [Browsable(false)]
            public string ConnectionString { get { return _connection; } set { _connection = value; } }

            [Browsable(false)]
            public string SaveString 
            {
                get 
                {
                    Constructors Cons = new Constructors();
                    string MyS = Cons.MyConstructor((object)this);
                    return MyS; 
                } 
            } 

            [Browsable(false)]
            public string UnsaveString 
            { 
                get 
                {
                    Constructors Cons = new Constructors();
                    string MyS = Cons.MyConstructor((object)this);
                    //string MyS = Constructors.MyConstructor((object)this);
                    if (_password != "")
                    {
                        MyS += ";Password=" + _password;
                    }

                    return MyS; 
                } 
            }
        #endregion General

        #region Source
            [DisplayName("DSN")]
            [Description("The DSN to use when connecting to the Data Source")]
            [DefaultValue("")]
            [Category("Source")]
            [ConstructorName("Dsn")]
            public string DSN { get { return _dsn; } set { _dsn = value; } }

… This is basically just a brief overview of the type of structs / objects that is passed

Answer 1

Ok sorry for wasting time here, but I found the problem. It is as HOBO suggested. one of my properties also called the same method (actually it was the second property of the exact class I set as the example above. I commented that one out and code was working. After an entire day spent – I feel like an idiot and wasted all you guys’ time… THANK You SO SO Much for all your help 🙂 I almost gave up on developing all together 🙂